In 2022, billionaire Kenneth Griffin moved the hedge fund company he founded, Citadel, from Chicago to Miami, citing Chicago’s crime levels and Florida’s business-friendly climate. With Griffin having given approximately a half-billion dollars to Chicago-based organizations over the years, nonprofit leaders feared that his absence would leave a gaping hole in the city’s philanthropic ecosystem.
Sadly, they were correct.
“Griffin’s philanthropic priorities and donations appear to have shifted to Florida,” wrote Crain Currency’s Brandon Dupré in April 2024. Griffin had already given organizations in the Sunshine State $300 million and “it remains to be seen whether the Chicago spigot has been shut off and, if so, who will fill the void.”
To be clear, with a net worth of $42 billion and a respectable Forbes philanthropy score of 3 — meaning he’s given away 5% to 9.99% of his wealth — Griffin likes to spread that wealth beyond whichever city he calls home. His portfolio includes gifts to New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the Santa Monica-based veterans organization Call of Duty Endowment and more than $500 million in combined support to his alma mater, Harvard University, where, as of earlier this year, he cut off funding, citing administrators’ handling of antisemitic incidents on campus and elite schools’ propensity for churning out, as he put it, “whiny snowflakes.”
He’s equally comfortable cutting checks for ambitious capital projects and museums as he is supporting direct service organizations, and as a major Republican donor — he contributed $100 million to conservatives in the 2024 election cycle and was Florida’s biggest political donor over the past four years — many of his gifts are infused with the kind of libertarian-leaning verbiage that’s become synonymous with the Chicago school of economics, which emphasizes free and efficient markets.
Last year, Griffin launched Griffin Catalyst, a “civic engagement initiative… encompassing his philanthropic and community impact efforts” across six areas, including education and upward mobility. More of a high-level manifesto and public clearinghouse of Griffin’s gifts going back to 2006 than a nuts-and-bolts operational roadmap, the initiative provides a useful frame to assess his sprawling philanthropy, which, according to Forbes, stands at $2.3 billion and counting.
Here are three things to know about Griffin’s recent giving, which, to the detriment of Chicago-based organizations, has increasingly flowed to the sunnier and lower-tax climes of South Florida.
His portfolio is as expansive as ever
Griffin’s unofficial philanthropic Chicago going away party took place in July 2022 when, with one foot figuratively out the door, he donated $130 million to 40 area organizations.
Recipients included the University of Chicago, where he previously served on the board and where a 2017 mega gift led administrators to rename the school’s department of economics after him. There was also Northwestern Medicine and an array of smaller outfits like the Project HOOD Leadership and Economic Opportunity Center and the Fourth Presbyterian Church, where funding was earmarked to endow meal distribution and other programs.
Add it all up, and the tranche encapsulated Griffin’s penchant for mixing huge gifts to large and endowed legacy institutions with the kind of grassroots direct service providers that aren’t on the radars of many billionaire givers.
At the time, Bloomberg’s Amanda Gordon reported that Griffin, who went to middle school and high school in Boca Raton, had already donated an estimated $55 million to organizations based in South Florida. With funding flowing to outfits like the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach and the Miami Foundation’s Miami Disaster Resilience Fund, Griffin was already pulling from the place-based playbook he honed in Chicago of supporting organizations in a variety of fields.
Once the calendar turned to 2023, money began moving out the door to South Florida organizations at a feverish clip.
In the first half of the year alone, Griffin donated $8 million for West Palm Beach’s Cox Science Center and Aquarium’s capital campaign, $25 million to fund a five-story tower at Miami’s Nicklaus Children’s Hospital, $5 million to build 50 “mini” soccer pitches in underresourced communities across Miami-Dade County and $20 million earmarked for scholarships to Miami Dade College — a refreshing example of an Ivy League graduate who, in addition to supporting his alma mater, channels funding to a public school that primarily serves middle- and lower-income students.
Griffin also partners with other billionaire givers. In March 2023, he and Schmidt Futures announced a $50 million commitment to Convergent Research, a research incubator founded by the former Google CEO. In December, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center announced it received a combined $400 million from Kenneth C. Griffin and the David Geffen Foundation, the charitable vehicle of the billionaire entertainment mogul. The support was earmarked for research, patient care, and programs including cancer prevention and detection.
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Griffin Catalyst provides a useful frame for his giving
Griffin’s numerous publicly announced gifts are offset by a pervasive — but not uncommon — degree of opacity. But a relatively new initiative from Griffin provides some insight into the big picture, and highlights his Florida pivot.
The Kenneth and Anne Griffin Foundation, named after his ex-wife, closed its doors after the couple divorced in 2015. The 2023 Form 990 for the Miami-based Citadel Group Foundation lists Griffin as its president and director; it disbursed $990,275 in grants that year. This prompts the conclusion that Griffin, who has said he would not sign the Giving Pledge, moves much of his largesse through his Kenneth C. Griffin Charitable Fund, which doesn’t have a public website, and since it isn’t listed on the IRS or ProPublica foundation directories, is likely a donor-advised fund that isn’t required to report its financials or grantees.
As a result, I’ve always had trouble identifying Griffin’s giving philosophy beyond stating, rather obviously, that he “has one of the more diverse portfolios in modern philanthropy.” In September 2023, however, Griffin launched Griffin Catalyst, which, adhering to the conventional precepts of strategic philanthropy, reflects his “strategic approach to tackling the world’s greatest challenges, advancing innovative, data-driven, and timely solutions.”
The Griffin Catalyst site does not include contact information and Bloomberg’s Gordon reported that the Catalyst brand “doesn’t alter his philanthropic staff or operations.” What Griffin Catalyst does do is summarize Griffin’s philanthropic efforts across six priority areas, list applicable grant partners and document quantifiable impact, making it a welcome effort to instill a greater degree of transparency and strategic rigor around his expansive giving.
Where the Sunshine State is concerned, Catalyst makes it clear that Griffin kept the spigot open to South Florida organizations in 2024, and the complexion of his public gifts mirrored those made before he launched the Griffin Catalyst brand.
They include a $50 million naming gift to the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine’s Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Cancer to fund the construction of a new, 120-story facility, $50 million to Baptist Health South Florida to research and develop treatments for Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative disorders, $9 million to Miami-Dade Public Schools to expand math tutoring, $7 million to fund the redevelopment of Phipps Ocean Park in Palm Beach and $2.1 million to Cristo Rey Miami School, a private Catholic college-preparatory school that serves students with limited financial means.
His advocacy for Wall Street South may have huge charitable consequences
In June 2024, two months after Crain Currency’s Brandon Dupré reported on the cavernous Griffin-sized void in Chicago’s philanthrosphere, the city’s nonprofit leaders let out a measured sigh of relief when Griffin announced a $10 million gift to Chicago’s Northwestern Medicine to fund research into esophageal diseases.
While the donation paled in comparison to his farewell tranche of gifts to Chicago in July 2022, it suggested that Griffin hadn’t completely turned his back on the city that continues to house Citadel employees. Looking ahead, I suspect he’ll continue to support large and evergreen institutions, like the University of Chicago and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, while continuing to cut checks to a broad range of institutions spread across the U.S.
That being said, Dupré’s larger point stands: Griffin’s place-based giving has inexorably shifted to his new home in South Florida and there’s nothing to suggest that an amalgamation of funders, much less a single donor, will compensate for his enormous charitable absence.
Zooming out further, we also know that Citadel’s move has contributed to a profound philanthropic ripple effect across South Florida. Much like the nascent Silicon Valley in the early 2000s, the region’s nonprofits and community foundations are enjoying a surge in contributions from recent transplants, many of whom work for companies that, like Citadel, have set up offices in Miami, including Goldman Sachs, the Blackstone Group, Carl Icahn’s Icahn Capital Management and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. (Unlike Citadel’s new headquarters, however, I doubt these companies’ offices will include a rooftop hotel and a dock that allows guests to arrive via Biscayne Bay.)
If the exodus continues apace and Griffin’s wager that Miami — aka “Wall Street South” — will replace or compete with New York as the country’s financial hub, it could have devastating philanthropic consequences for Big Apple-based organizations that rely on the generosity of Wall Street (north) funders. If this scenario seems like a far-fetched case of philanthropic catastrophizing, the city of Chicago would like to have a word.
Update (12/5/24): This article has been updated to reflect the fact that Griffin’s $400 million gift in 2023 to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center came from Kenneth C. Griffin, and not the Kenneth C. Griffin Charitable Fund.
